From Fenye to Fengshui: Applying Correlative Cosmography in Late Imperial China

Abstract

This paper documents the resilience of fenye (分野, lit., “field allocation”) and its applications through the nineteenth century in China. Despite literati (and eventually imperial) criticisms that the fenye system of correlative cosmography was outdated and unworthy of belief, fenye retained a sizeable audience through the close of the Qing period. At the top, the Qing imperial state continued to reference fenye correlations in its official communications late into the dynasty. In local society, literati looked to newly issued dynastic sources of astrological knowledge to update local gazetteers; in the nineteenth century, these trends were pronounced along frontier areas lacking longstanding gazetteer records. Finally, people engaged in the practice of fengshui looked to fenye knowledge to update the values and layout of the compass, the historical origins of which related to geomantic practices. In the Qing period, the compass was both theoretically and physically altered under the influence of Jesuit-introduced “Western Learning” (Xixue 西學). The paper contends that the status of fenye in pre-twentieth century China was seldom an allor-nothing proposition between a celebrated component of imperial orthodoxy and an outdated relic in inexorable decline: people critiqued fenye, used fenye, and updated fenye.

Keywords

• astronomy
• astrology
• china
• fengshui
• compass